THE WORLD BANK’S OPEN KNOWLEDGE REPOSITORY
The World Bank is the largest source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is an official open access repository containing research results and scientific products of the World Bank.
The Open Access Policy and OKR represent the third major achievement in the World Bank’s Open Development Agenda, joining these earlier initiatives.:
Open Data Initiative (launched in April 2010): a number of reforms that provide free access to thousands of development indicators, as well as extensive information on World Bank projects and financing.
Information Access Policy (introduced in July 2010): An innovative change in the way the World Bank provides information to the public.
By expanding and improving access to World Bank research, the bank aims to encourage innovation and empower anyone in the world to use the bank’s knowledge to improve the lives of people living in poverty. The Goals and Key Results (OKR) are constantly updated with new content, as well as archived reports and research.
OKR is built on the DSpace platform, an open source platform widely used in the open access community and providing over 2,000 open repositories, and is compatible with other repositories. It supports optimal accessibility and reusability of content, conforming to the standards of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) . All OKR metadata is available through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and through the REST API.
Since its launch in 2012, millions of publications have been downloaded from the OKR platform, and almost half of its users live in developing countries. OKR was named one of the “Best Free Reference Websites of 2013” by ALA RUSA. The World Bank also received the 2012 Open Access Innovator Award from the Coalition of Scientific Publications and Academic Resources (SPARC) for the OKR platform.